The Marine Corps Stores Huge Amounts Of Armor And Weaponry In Norwegian Caves

Armored variants of the
M1114 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) are
transported by truck from a ship offload location to one of six
caves which make up the Marine Corps Prepositioning
Program-Norway during an equipment modernization
operation.United States Marine
Corps

Norway sits at the pinnacle of the UN's Human Development Index,
and the world's most advanced country (by that metric, at least)
has a national defense policy to match. Norway was one of the
world's
top twenty weapons importers between 2008 and 2012, and
collaborates with the U.S. on major defense projects like the
F-35 joint strike fighter jet. Its leaders have an laudably
strategic approach to securing the country's vital interests, and
it's one of NATO's more well-equipped and well-prepared European
member states.

Norway also shares a 120-mile land border with Russia. And at the
same time a heavily-armed Russian convey
draws ever closer to eastern Ukraine — raising the
possibility of another escalation in the Ukraine's
already-restive east — the U.S. Marine Corps is re-supplying a
vital pre-positioning site in central Norway.

The
resupply mission, ostensibly aimed at replacing equipment
used during a February 2014 cold weather training exercise,
began before the Russian convoy departed and isn't in any way
connected to events in Ukraine. Still, the resupply of a
30-year-old system of subterranean pre-positioning sites shows
how Norway is still relevant to NATO and the U.S.'s defense
posture. The end-result of the re-supply is that the U.S. — and
by extension the NATO alliance — has
400 vehicles and 300 containers' worth of equipment close to
Russia's border with Scandinavian Europe, at a time when Moscow
seems resistant to most forms of Western diplomatic and economic
pressure.

And as The Washington Post
reported last week, this latest re-supply will leave the site
with an unprecedented stash of American weaponry, including "M1A1
Abrams battle tanks, armored amphibious assault vehicles that can
swim from Navy ships to shore, armored Humvee gun trucks,"
marking "the
first time that the tanks and several other kinds of vehicles
will be allowed in the caves. That includes the Marine Corps’
Assault Breacher Vehicle, a 72-ton vehicle that has a
tank chassis, but has been outfitted to clear improvised
explosive devices with a plow and line that can be shot 150 yards
ahead of the vehicle with explosives on it."

The Norwegian pre-positioning program began in 1981, after
Norway's leaders decided that the deterrent effect of a U.S.
weapons stash was worth the potential complications of becoming
such a close adjunct of the U.S.'s Cold War defense policies.
This was a particularly tense period of the Cold War, just after
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Today, the Marines still store weapons and materiel in six
climate-controlled caves in Trondheim, in central
Norway. The Trondheim
complex is
designed to supporta
"notional" battle-ready contingent of 16,000 Marines and sailors
with 30-days worth of supplies.

M1A1 Abrams Main Battle
Tanks and other vehicles and equipment are staged for
transportation at the designated offload pier during a
pre-planned Single Ship Movement and offload of military
equipment from a Maritime Prepositioning Force ship in the
Trøndelag region of Norway in a photo published on August 13,
2014.United States Marine
Corps

The Trondheim stash was a Cold
War development, and a relic of a time when Norway was one of
NATO's front-line states with the Soviet
Union. A1991 Rand
corporation reportreviewed
a number of Soviet invasion scenarios of Norway and determined
that along the country's rocky and easily-garrisoned coastline, a
single NATO brigade could hold off an entire Soviet
division.

The notion of conventional
ground warfare in Scandinavia seemed less absurd 23 years ago
than it might today. NATO was built for a confrontation with the
Soviet bloc. And in a nightmare scenario — vague but plausible,
during the Soviet Union's final chaotic years — the Soviets could
pressure western Europe through establishing a foothold in
Norway's sparsely populated arctic north.

The Marine Corp's strategic
pre-positioning in central Norway would not just deter this kind
of aggression: according to the Rand report, it would also allow
the NATO states to compensate for a projected seven-day
head-start that the Soviets would have on their adversaries if
they ever did decide to move on western or central Europe.

Two decades after the fall of
the Soviet Union, these calculations are jarringly anachronistic.
If the idea of Norway as a potential battlefield is a bit
outdated, the pre-positioning caves are not. They were used as
way-stations for equipment during the U.S.'s Iraq and
Afghanistan missions. The Department of Defense has a
highly-regimented identification and maintenance regimen in place
for Trondheim, as
explained through this somewhat bewildering
infographic:

U.S. Department of Defense

As Putin increases pressure
Ukraine — and projects the impression that he might move his
military into the country — the U.S. has built an ever-growing
stash of military assets under a mountain in one of Russia's
neighbors. These two developments aren't directly linked. But
they show how at least some aspects of Cold War defense policy
have endured.

And Trondheim gives NATO and the U.S. some
additional flexibility, and perhaps some deterrence capacity, if
the ongoing crisis between Russia and the West ever spirals out
of control.